ner
draws from his lowering skies and dark woods, his mists on level and
height, the grey in grey of his atmosphere, and his ever varying
landscape. A raw climate drives man indoors in mind as well as body,
and prompts that craving for spring and delight in its coming which
have been the chief notes in northern feeling for Nature from
earliest times.

Vischer has shewn in his _Aesthetik_, that German feeling was early
influenced by the different forms of plant life around it. Rigid
pine, delicate birch, stalwart oak, each had its effect; and the
wildness and roughness of land, sea, and animal life in the North
combined with the cold of the climate to create the taste for
domestic comfort, for fireside dreams, and thought-weaving by the
hearth.

Nature schooled the race to hard work and scanty pleasure, and yet
its relationship to her was deep and heartfelt from the first.
Devoutly religious, it gazed at her with mingled love and fear; and
the deposit of its ideas about her was its mythology.

Its gods dwelt in mountain tops, holes in the rocks, and rivers, and
especially in dark forests and in the leafy boughs of sacred trees;
and the howling of wind, the rustle of leaves, the soughing in the
tree tops, were sounds of their presence. The worship of woods lasted
far into Christian times, especially among the Saxons and
Frisians.[1]

Wodan was the all-powerful father of gods and men--the highest god,
who, as among all the Aryan nations, represented Heaven. Light was
his shining helmet, clouds were the dark cap he put on when he spread
rain over the earth, or crashed through the air as a wild hunter with
his raging pack. His son Donar shewed himself in thunder and
lightning, as he rode with swinging axe on his goat-spanned car.
Mountains were sacred to both, as plants to Ziu. Freyr and Freya were
goddesses of fertility, love, and spring; a ram was sacred to them,
whose golden fleece illuminated night as well as day, and who drew
their car with a horse's speed.[2] As with Freya, an image of the
goddess Nerthus was drawn through the land in spring, to announce
peace and fertility to mortals.

The suggestive myth of Baldur, god of light and spring, killed by
blind Hoedur, was the expression of general grief at the passing of
beauty.

The _Edda_ has a touching picture of the sorrow of Nature, of her
trees and plants, when the one beloved of all living things fell,
pierced by an arrow. Holda was first the mild and gra